Post-Naming Epistemic Concealment (PNEC) : Technology Bias and Behavioural Risk in Coercive Control

This paper examines how institutional naming of surveillance and stalking allegations, when filtered through technology-centred risk frameworks, produces systematic misreading of behavioural risk in coercive control contexts. Rather than reducing harm, method-based analysis displaces scrutiny away from intent, escalation triggers, and behavioural continuity, allowing post-naming adaptation and concealment to occur unchecked.Coercive control is commonly treated as a modern legal innovation requiring explicit statutory criminalisation to become visible or actionable. This paper argues the opposite. Long before coercive control was named in statute, courts possessed common-law doctrines capable of addressing its constituent behaviours, including harassment, misuse of process, and recklessness causing psychological harm. The failure was not legislative absence but analytic misclassification. Drawing on established stalking research, this paper demonstrates that escalation to surveillance is well understood to be triggered by relationship breakdown, rejection, and loss of control, yet legal analysis continues to prioritise method over intent. The paper introduces Post-Naming Epistemic Concealment (PNEC) to explain how, once allegations are institutionally named particularly through technologised frames risk assessment becomes tethered to tools rather than behavioural intent, enabling displacement, escalation, and aggravated psychological harm despite formal intervention.